Fire and smoke detection in complex electronic equipment is made difficult when associated electronic components and devices are densely populated over an expansive area, such as in hardware cabinets frequently used in data centers or like environments. The cabinets typically contain a rack of air-cooled electronic hardware chassis enclosures with numerous components, where each enclosure is cooled by its own stream of coolant air.
A smoke or fire detection device positioned at one location in one chassis enclosure will not reliably detect smoke or fire in other chassis enclosures in the same cabinet, or even in other locations in the same chassis enclosure. Furthermore, retrofitting smoke or fire detection devices to existing equipment is made difficult by lack of free space in dense, complex configurations of the electronics. Undetected, smoke or fire could ruin the contents of affected hardware, and put lives and the entire data center facility at risk.
To completely cover all circuit boards in a typical rack of electronic chassis in an air-cooled cabinet with smoke or fire detecting sensors could require numerous sensors, possibly on the order of 30-60 sensors per electronic computer chassis. This would not only be difficult to physically accommodate in an already crowded chassis, but it could also be a challenge to monitor and analyze the sensor output of so many sensors, given the number of chassis in each cabinet and a large number of cabinets in a data center.